Title : "Music streaming platforms have sexism wired-in."
link : "Music streaming platforms have sexism wired-in."
"Music streaming platforms have sexism wired-in."
Jawad Iqbal writes in the London Times:
Their algorithms, which recommend things you might like based on your listening habits, are basically sexist, generating playlist after playlist dominated by male musicians.
Isn't it like sexual preference — you really do respond to the sex of the singer? With no machine helping me at all, I can see in the music choices I am making that I prefer a male voice.
Those damning findings...
Damning!!
... come from research conducted at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Academics analysed the listening patterns of 330,000 users over nine years: only a quarter of the artists they listened to were women, because on average the first algorithm-recommended track was always by a man; listeners had to wait until the seventh or eighth song before hearing from a woman.
It's a problem only if you assume that the outcome should be equal. But isn't the algorithm attuned to what people have responded to?
Some of this bias is a reflection of historical failures in the music industry, which has always been dominated by male acts, save for occasional superstars such as Taylor Swift or Beyoncé.
Maybe we respond to what we respond to because it's familiar, and what is familiar is a consequence of sexist decision-making within the music industry. Why do we like what we like? Is it deep or is it shallow?
There's something called the "mere exposure" effect (Wikipedia):
The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often someone sees a person, the more pleasing and likeable they find that person...
In the 1960s, a series of Robert Zajonc's laboratory experiments demonstrated that simply exposing subjects to a familiar stimulus led them to rate it more positively than other, similar stimuli that had not been presented before....
In 1980, Zajonc proposed the affective primacy hypothesis: that affective reactions (such as liking) can be "elicited with minimal stimulus input." Through mere-exposure experiments, Zajonc sought to provide evidence for the affective-primacy hypothesis, namely that affective judgments are made without prior cognitive processes....
[One] experiment exposed Chinese characters for short times to two groups of people. They were then told that these symbols represented adjectives and were asked to rate whether the symbols held positive or negative connotations. The symbols the subjects had previously seen were consistently rated more positively than those they had not. In a similar experiment, people were not asked to rate the connotations of the symbols, but to describe their mood after the experiment. Members of the group with repeated exposure to certain characters reported being in better moods than those without....
Why do we like the pop songs we like, and what is Spotify doing to our brains refeeding us what we've been fed before? Is it evil — damnable? The question whether it's sexist is only a small part of the problem. That seems to focus on whether the singers are getting their due or are penalized by pernicious subordination. But the minds of the listeners are much more important. There are billions of us, and we're plugged into this system of endless feeding and refeeding. Within it, we have the feeling of being pleased. But neither the machine nor we understand why we are pleased.
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